Ottawa’s suburbs are getting downtown density but without the mix of housing and shopping that usually makes for lively neighbourhoods, according to numbers in a new city report.

The suburbs are getting more duplexes and townhouses, smaller detached houses, and even apartments. But there are fewer places to buy milk or headache pills or a birthday card — and still hardly anywhere it’s easy to walk or bike to, which is worrying if we’re at all serious about building a city where you don’t have to drive to do everything. The city government is very conscious of preserving corner stores in downtown neighbourhoods, having realized a bit late that zoning rules aimed at wiping them out were bad, but it’s not getting them included in new neighbourhoods being built from scratch.

The report is titled (sorry about this): “Comparative Analysis of Residential Development Ratios, 2015 Update.” The point of it is to argue that newer subdivisions aren’t gobbling up more land than older ones did and so we don’t need to increase the amount of land we open for development on Ottawa’s outskirts. Ottawa planners looked at 22 chunks of Kanata, south Nepean, Leitrim and Orléans, figuring out how much land each subdivision uses for what, and how that’s changed.

It’s changed a lot.

Before 2000, almost half the land in Ottawa suburbs was used for single detached houses. In subdivisions built between 2005 and 2015, it was just over a third. They’re still the dominant form of housing by far, despite that big decline. But detached houses are being built smaller and closer together than they used to be, with the number of houses per hectare having increased by 21 per cent.

Put all the types together, the city says, and we’re now devoting less land in new subdivisions to housing and what we are using, we’re using more efficiently.

What we aren’t doing is including a lot of things that aren’t houses. Retail and commercial uses have declined from 2.5 per cent of the land to 1.4 per cent — so they were never big, but they’ve still shrunk by nearly half. Some of the newer neighbourhoods have no retail or commerce, no schools or institutions (like libraries, churches or mosques), nothing in them at all except housing, parks and utilities.

(What’s made up the difference? Bigger stormwater ponds, more than anything else, which have gone from 0.3 per cent of the land in subdivisions to 5.1 per cent. Also roads, which have gone from 23.2 per cent to 27.4 per cent. “This may reflect increased use of a modified grid street layout, which although using more land for roads also allows for higher densities by reducing the number of ‘pie-shaped’ lots,” the city’s analysis says. Smaller lots need more streets, in other words.)

Where stores are built, they’re still still clustered in strip malls at the edges, facing arterial roads.

“It shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody,” said Coun. Jan Harder, who chairs city council’s planning committee and represents Barrhaven.

“The generation that’s moving into the suburbs now is, I mean, it’s the online-shopping generation,” she said. There are still Costcos, heaven knows, but no Future Shops and fewer Best Buys because Amazon has sucked up a lot of the big-box business. The broad trend is toward smaller, Harder believes. “You have to look at the kind of retail you need.”

Of course, it’s still awfully hard to walk to a peripheral supermarket if all you need is bread.

“People are less willing to walk because we just don’t have the time,” Harder said. Commuting can take hours a day. Suburbs like hers have almost no office or industrial jobs, so residents drive in and out. Regardless of what might be nice to have, what customers actually use is driveable stores, not walkable or bikeable ones, Harder said. She has a bike she likes for family rides but is too fearful to contemplate using it for errands on Barrhaven’s roads.

She hopes a new high-end office park in south Barrhaven will start to change the scene by letting more people spend their whole days there, freeing up time and making walking or biking more viable commuting choices for more people. In the long run, she expects more shared offices for freelancers will pop up, too.

All of this will be worked into a city project to build better suburbs, which the planning department has been working on for years and which is supposed to be finished later in 2017.

“I think we need to take the best things we’ve got from everywhere,” Harder said. “I really think that’s going to be a legacy for Jan Harder.”

This Week's Flyers

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.